Assuring quality, so we can ensure safety

John Allan, DE&S Head of Quality, Safety and Environmental Protection, explains why being confident in the quality of our systems and outputs is essential to achieving our mission.

Quality is something we encounter every day. We expect to book online deliveries easily, our kettle to work, and a clean reliable bus to arrive on time. When quality is ‘done right’ most people don’t give it, or the work that went into it, a second thought. But it’s often quickly apparent when something isn’t right. The impact of a failure in quality can be simple frustration or something more dangerous, such as an electric shock from the kettle.

Our approach to quality matters. It impacts how efficiently and effectively we are able to deliver our outputs. Within DE&S, and the wider MOD, the scope of our quality assurance work ranges from the processes and systems that we, our partners and suppliers use to the products and services we procure and support with them. Proper quality assurance means our processes work as planned, and those products and services perform as intended and needed. Not maintaining quality can lead to increased time and costs to resolve issues and defects, and delays and performance issues that cause breaks in service and gaps in capabilities – placing our armed forces and allies at risk.

Ultimately, how well we assure quality affects the end-users of our products and services, who need to be able to rely on things performing as expected. Assuring quality helps for safe and effective acquisition.

According to the Chartered Quality Institute, the UK’s professional quality body (more from their CEO later in this edition), getting quality right requires an organisation focus on governance, assurance and improvement. These provide us with a structured approach to delivering, reviewing and refining our operations. This will come to the fore as DE&S shifts to a leaner, more agile operating model, becoming a learning-focused organisation working to embed a culture of continual improvement.

Our approach to quality assurance, internally and externally, will be a key enabler of this. With the information we gather through our work, we are developing a ‘heatmap’ of where DE&S should concentrate its improvement activities, embedding these within updated governance arrangements, and using assurance to confirm their effectiveness.

Improving the quality assurance information we gather with, and on, our supply chain can help us make better informed decisions on supplier selection. It can also help us manage the risks associated with particular technologies, determine which areas to measure and review with industry, and where and when to focus strategic engagement and surveillance. Ultimately, this ensures we can be confident that what we are providing to our armed forces will consistently perform.

‘Quality’ is a good enabler for our organisation. It has the potential to be a great enabler if we ‘think quality’ early enough to avoid the potential consequences of poor quality. We don’t need everyone to be ‘quality experts’ to do this. We need to understand the basics, and know when and where to seek out advice, help and support from quality colleagues to ensure the way we work is right, we have the right balance of assurance, and we are always open to seeing potential areas for improvement and continual learning. Hopefully this edition of Desider will go some way toward improving our collective understanding, so we can be as safe as reasonably practicable, while pursuing operational excellence and continual improvement.